The provision of tools to focus user interaction in analysing data to come to a decision is the core principle of a decision supporting system. This became the inherent characteristic of decision support systems to counter the cognitive overload issues associated with management information systems arising from their proficiency in gathering and collating into larger and larger reports. A simil...

The Internet is an incredible technology, offering users a vast choice of new songs and catalogue that can be browsed, streamed or bought online. This paper aims to provide an explanation of factors influencing purchase intention of early adopters towards online music. An empirical survey was used to test the hypotheses. Data were collected from a total of 200 questionnaires distributed to earl...

In recent years, distance education has enjoyed a major boom. Much work at The Open University (OU) has focused on improving retention rates in these modules by providing timely support to students who are at risk of failing the module. In this paper we explore methods for analysing student activity in online virtual learning environment (VLE) – General Unary Hypotheses Automaton (GUHA) and Mar...

A novel approach to background/foreground segmentation using an online EM algorithm is presented. The method models each layer as a Gaussian mixture, with local, per pixel, parameters for the background layer and global parameters for the foreground layer, utilising information from the entire scene when estimating the foreground. Additionally, the online EM algorithm uses a progressive learnin...

Each time a learner in a self-paced online course is trying to answer an assessment question, it takes some time to submit the answer, and if multiple attempts are allowed and the first answer was incorrect, it takes some time to submit the second attempt, and so on. Here we study the distribution of such “response times”. We find that the log-normal statistical model for such times, previously...

This paper presents an indirect adaptive fuzzy control scheme for a class of single-input-single-output (SISO) nonlinear systems. A Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model is employed as a dynamical model of the partially known nonlinear system. Both the structure and the parameters of the T-S model are identified on-line. A T-S model based feedback linearization controller (FLC) is designed and a Lyap...

Understanding and forecasting the health of an online community is of great value to its owners and managers who have vested interests in its longevity and success. Nevertheless, the association between community evolution and the behavioural patterns and trends of its members is not clearly understood, which hinders our ability of making accurate predictions of whether a community is flourishi...

This work investigates how local preferences, social structural constraints and randomness might affect the development of the friendship network in Facebook. We do this by analyzing a snapshot Facebook dataset of Princeton University‟s students, and by building an agent-based simulation for comparison. Several different, but plausible, processes of friendship network development are proposed i...